Recent posts by Danaroth on Kongregate

I also agree that flash gaming is a dying media, mostly because developers reasonably switched to the richer iOS/Android market; admittely, we just had a fantastic series of badges recently, featuring the best series of games I have ever seen highlighted on Kongregate, but they mostly featured old classic. My vote goes to Musaic Box as well.

I actually think it would make a pretty decent roleplay/exploration game, as long as it isn’t totally focused on the same bigger themes of the book and just concentrates on the arena itself; maybe it could work a bit more like the Greed Island saga in Hunter x Hunter. Anyway I don’t expect any major company to sponsorize such a project since the fanbase of rpgs is quite different from the one of the books.

Originally posted by Blizzard2000: Lack of good hitboxes is why Fracuum can be annoying

Colour me surprised, but how can a game that is completely made out of squares have bad hitboxes? I don’t think the developer, which is definitely no amateur, has intentionally messed up with their sizes just to annoy people; I tried it multiple times on newgrounds while getting all the medals and never found any hit to be unfair. Care to elaborate when such occurrence happens?

1- Irritating because of intentional bad design, usually because of repetitivity or pretentiousness;
2- Not fun and hasn’t good visuals either;
3- Nice to look at, but with a gameplay I don’t fully enjoy;
4- Fun and with no gamebreaking flaws in its execution, but that doesn’t leave an impression;
5- Enjoyable and also has either challenge or originality.

How exactly is time the dependant variable? Time doesnt depend on the number of accounts made. 5 days will pass regardless if 20 or 20,000 accounts are made.

The duration of the interval the OP is looking for is dependant on the fact that 1 million accounts are made. If those aren’t made I can’t know how long that interval is, so I see that as dependant variable.
While using x-axis would make sense too, I’m just saying that it’s neither mathematically wrong, nor unelegant to use such plotting, so I see no reason to point that out as a way to diss Maik.

To be perfectly honest, I think that putting time on the y-axis makes more sense in this context, since that is usually used for the dependant variable. Given the target of this discussion, which is to find the time interval given a specific population growth I see nothing bad in plotting as it was done in this thread.

No badge for full gold on Talesworth, nor for full completition in Fancy Pants, nor for getting A’s in The Ice temple are all examples of terrible badge design; who has decided to pick all those subpar conditions for hard badges lately?

Maybe at some point when we have another dry spell and no new games that need badges, but the rating is pretty darn low right now, so I wouldn’t hold your breath in the mean time.

There are some similar games of the same genre with API that have a bigger rating, like Vertigo, Mr Bree, which I hope will get precedence anyway or with a comparable rating like Wrath of Anubis which I hope will be considered as well.

Also, since I pass by, were the developers of Coop Toon Shooter contacted for adding API? The game is personally the best multiplayer game I’ve run into on Kongregate, also currently the best rated in my favourite list (4.27).
This probably suffered from the attack of some spam attack since on release the rating was utterly low, but it constantly kept raising during all this time; it would really deserve some extra exposure.

Enough Plumbers doesn’t steal the sprites from Nintendo Games, while Abobo does, so that automatically makes it infringe the Terms of Service. I actually wonder why it wasn’t removed, since similar games like Pokemon TD and Super Mario Crossover are not on this website anymore, even if they were guilty of the exactly same copyright issue.

If you need some stuff for more complicated questions about less known games feel free to visit this thread, where a guy specifically links to underrated little gems.My favorite list pretty much has the same function but it’s a bit more biased towards certain genres, like puzzles and platformers.

If you are going for mainstream titles and easy questions, just visit the top rated.

Really enjoyed your game; a modality featuring only the hard questions would be very welcomed ^^ I’d also enjoy a modality where you just have to guess the title of the game from the screenshot and a modality with no screenshot at all for the real hardcore ones.

If people would spend loads on money on that stuff just because they enjoy it and not because they are addicted, then why those big donations are only for some strictly specific structures that are prone to make people addicted?
There are tons of extremely good games on this website, yet only mmos seem to be getting the “donations” from whales.

I don’t think Patzilla’s is such a weird request actually; some people may enjoy strategy games without liking the Tower Defense structure by itself, yet the big majority of the games in the Strategy category are TDs. Even if he just checked the Strategy tag, he’d still find those included.

I’d personally support if it was possible to implement a wider feature that allows to filter games’ tags through multiple criterias, like Strategy and non-TD in this particular case, but I suppose that may be stressful for servers; in any case I don’t see the reason to diss an opinion on an issue that isn’t so esoteric, given the fact that TDs are probably the most popular genre in flash developing at the current time.

Originally posted by EndlessSporadic:
If Kongregate staff can’t provide a good reason for why they are just throwing badges they didn’t earn themselves at people, I feel like Danaroth’s statement about Kongregate using badges to get developers money is a true statement and badges have lost their original meaning.

EDIT: Note that my rant isn’t about Fairyway in particular. Don’t get me started with Zilch.

Well, it doesn’t seem an understatement to say that badges are a way to forward money at developers by boosting their traffic; I actually don’t think there is anything unethical or conceptually wrong in such a behaviour, since that makes players, Kongregate and developers happy. If Kongregate would not profit from it, they wouldn’t have hired 2 people with this specifical task.

Yet, I definitely think that Fairway Solitaire badge design has nothing to do with this perspective; if raw just wanted players to buy the mobile version of the game, then providing minimal frustration would have worked better.

Putting the flaws aside, I actually had fun in collecting all the stars myself and they feel extremely appropriate for a solitaire game, a genre which isn’t based on finding a foolproof strategy, but to overcome a certain setup with a degree of strategical choices. If everyone would be able to beat whatever setup, no one would play a solitaire anymore since no one wants to play a game with a known outcome. Such a badge design that involves all the features of a game is actually what I hope they will go for in the future (hopefully applied to harder games).

I don’t feel like rummaging through old threads to find the exact quote, but greg did state that it’s one of their main concerns not to hurt the players’ perception of a game with a frustrating design and I do agree to a certain extent that developers should be preserved, yet I also think badges’ influence in this process is overrated. He also stated that Kongregate is a business and they need the mmos’ microtransactions to keep operating and Kong will keep supporting them, which also doesn’t seem anything surprising. I just find a bit unethical to get money at the risk of making players fall into the trap of compulsive addiction, but there is nothing that can be done about it.

@Danaroth it is the same reason relatively “easy” badges are given to mmos though. Any mmo player in that game instantly gets that badge so any hardcore players in those games will also get the badge. Many of the old impossible badges are repititive and mindless so don’t go telling me mmos are more mindless. I actually see mmos like tyrant having way more strategy/skill later on which applies to many mmos.

I have no problems in badging games like Tyrant since their rating was high enough, yet there have been mmos with low-end rating that got badges as well, so in that case it’s just to monetize, as it was also confirmed by the admins themselves and it’s a reasonable behaviour from a company side of view. Of course there were mistakes in the past, since targets like Balloon Invasion or Monsters’ Den definitely feel extremely mindless and I don’t mind mmos getting whatever badge they want, since I won’t go playing any of those, yet I do want that the games I like to have what they deserve as well.

Also I didn’t say mmos are mindless, my opinion is that they just twist people’s minds to make them unconsciounsly trapped inside in a way that’s similar to drug or gambling addiction, giving them an unfair advantage in terms of gameplay and revenue compared to the rest of Kongregate’s gamebase.

I’m not exactly sure why you think badges mean any less now than they did 4 years ago, they still have the same exact point, which is to get points to level up. That’s it basically

I totally agree with Draco myself; I suppose he means that in the past badges weren’t intended just as a way to preserve the game and the developer or to give visibility to games that are based on gaming addiction, but to give an actual challenge to the player.
I especially find it absurd that nowadays whatever excuse is valid not to give a challenging badge to any game. One time is because the genre enough impossible already, another because the badge has too much content already, another because it’s too hard to be balanced, another time because people like to be relaxed, etc.

There is absolutely no reason games like Diamond Hollow 2, SCGMD4, Bullet Heaven, Focus to have such easy badges when they are actually balanced to be pretty harsh on the player and they specifically target hardcore players. Assigning dumbed down challenges to them means not cathering to the actual people who are interested to play them.

The only thing that annoyed me is that it’s really boring to stack a lot of clubs. It would have been much better if the game just awarded a set amount of clubs in each level, making that feature non exploitable; the game definitely has flaws and this specific kind of solitaire was already around when flash games were in their early years (not sure about the actual name, but it’s probably Tri Peaks), so that the only reason this has an almost decent rating is because of the annoying advertisements all around Kong.

I also didn’t like the possibility to get a random perfect score, since I don’t feel accomplished by cheating a win that way, but at least I have the chance not to use that feature (yeah, by losing a card >-<).

EDIT: Forgot to say this is a very appropriate hard badge in my book, as it flashes out all the features of the game.

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